Across the street from his home George sawed the dead wood from the trees and then, with three days to spare, Kate turned her attention to the ravine.  She thought that probably she could teach better there in the spring than in the school building.  She and George talked it over.  He raised all the objections he could think of that the townspeople would, while entirely agreeing with her himself, but it was of no use.  She over-ruled the proxy objections he so kindly offered her, so he was obliged to drag his tired body up the trees on both banks for several hundred yards and drop the dead wood.  Kate marshalled a corps of boys who would be her older pupils and they dragged out the dry branches, saved all that were suitable for firewood, and made bonfires from the remainder.  They raked the tin cans and town refuse of years from the water and banks and induced the village delivery man to haul the stuff to the river bridge and dump it in the deepest place in the stream.  They cleaned the creek bank to the water’s edge and built rustic seats down the sides.  They even rolled boulders to the bed and set them where the water would show their markings and beat itself to foam against them.  Mrs. Holt looked on in breathless amazement and privately expressed to her son her opinion of him in terse and vigorous language.  He answered laconically:  “Has a fish got much to say about what happens to it after you get it out of the water?”

“No!” snapped Mrs. Holt, “and neither have you, if you kill yourself to get it.”

“Do I look killed?” inquired her son.

“No.  You look the most like a real man I ever saw you,” she conceded.

“And Kate Bates won’t need glasses for forty years yet,” he said as he went back to his work in the ravine.

Kate was in the middle of the creek helping plant a big stone.  He stood a second watching her as she told the boys surrounding her how best to help her, then he turned away, a dull red burning his cheek.  “I’ll have her if I die for it,” he muttered, “but I hope to Heaven she doesn’t think I am going to work like this for her every day of my life.”

As the villagers sauntered past and watched the work of the new teacher, many of them thought of things at home they could do that would improve their premises greatly, and a few went home and began work of like nature.  That made their neighbours’ places look so unkempt that they were forced to trim, and rake, and mend in turn, so by the time the school began, the whole village was busy in a crusade that extended to streets and alleys, while the new teacher was the most popular person who had ever been there.  Without having heard of such a thing, Kate had started Civic Improvement.

George Holt leaned against a tree trunk and looked down at her as he rested.

“Do you suppose there is such a thing as ever making anything out of this?” he asked.

“A perfectly lovely public park for the village, yes; money, selling it for anything, no!  It’s too narrow a strip, cut too deeply with the water, the banks too steep.  Commercially, I can’t see that it is worth ten cents.”